Thursday, June 17, 2010

My Life as a Story...

Yesterday morning as I was busy being confused about what day it was and boiling bagels at 9 in the morning a client called me. He wanted to know when I would be finished with a project that he had sent. I was completely confused with regard to dates - and reminded him that I'd said it would take me until the end of the week. Turns out that was last week. He sent me the thing 2 weeks ago. *sigh* I must be losing my marbles.So, I sat down and started working. It's a booklet layout project. He sent 20 A4 pages of text and told me to 'format it as a booklet and make it look pretty' - I decided to scale it down to an A5 booklet so that it would look like more than just a 10 page pamphlet. Did I mention that the text is 98% in Hebrew with a smattering of random English terms thrown in?

It took me 5 hours to put the text onto the pages and format it. Why? Well, for some odd reason whenever I get work from this client, the actual text is a mess. There are extra 'spaces' between words in the middle of sentences for no reason, the 'periods' don't follow the last word in the sentence, instead they're attached to the first word of the next sentence. There are random hard-enters smack in the middle of sentences. (Are there any graphic people out there reading this? I know they taught us that it's not the GA's job to type text - but they also said that if we see typos or errors that it's 'nice' to correct them. So what am I supposed to do? Leave the 20 page document with all its extra spaces and whatnot or just place it and if the client complains say "well, that's what you sent me." Anybody? Advice?) I know I have to format the tables and stuff - but spending that much time editing the punctuation and spacing seems nuts.

I sat down to work at around 2PM, and the next time I looked at the clock it was 6:30PM so I asked Z whether he wanted dinner. He said, "yes." (Surprise surprise) - so I went to the kitchen to get it ready.

I turned on the oven to preheat and then sliced up sweet potatoes into fries. After lining them up on a tray I drizzled a tiny bit of olive oil over them. Finally for seasoning I sprinkled on some kosher salt, black pepper and garlic powder. (Yay for savory!)

Then I turned my attention to the 'franks-in-blankets' - (Z specially requested them on Tuesday, so I took the hotdogs out of the freezer in the morning so they could defrost, along with puff-pastry dough.) I cut off a narrow strip of dough and rolled it out (using a little flour to prevent sticking) so that it would be enough to cover the 4 hotdogs. Then I cut it into 4 pieces, rolled up the little-doggies and used some water to seal the ends. Using a sharp serrated knife I cut the wrapped franks into 1/3rds and put them on the tray.By 7PM the food was in the oven. I went back to work for 15 minutes and then checked in on it. Nothing much was happening but I figured 15 minutes isn't really very long, it probably just needs more time. Another 15 minutes passed and I went to check on it again. Now the food had been in the oven for half an hour so I was confused when I peeked in and the oil wasn't bubbling, the hotdogs weren't growing and the puff-pastry wasn't puffing.

Climax:

Cautiously I stuck my hand into the oven to check if the heat was on as I glanced at the temperature knobs. Finally something clicked in my head.

Moment of Clarity and Insight:

I had turned on the convection fan for the bottom oven and put the food into the bottom oven but had turned the heat on in the top oven instead.

Resolution:

I turned off the top oven, turned on the bottom oven, reset the timer and 45 minutes later we had dinner - which was nice. It even tasted pretty good.